It’s always the guy you least expect, amirite? John Cleese, beloved around the world for his comic turns in the Monty Python troupe, as well as for his brilliant portrayal of the addlepated innkeeper Basil Fawlty, has been reported to Prevent, Britain’s counterterror policing program.
Has Cleese answered the call of Allah and strapped on a bomb vest? Has he applied for flight school and explained that he didn’t need to learn how to take off or land? No, it’s nothing like that. The unpardonable sin and possible criminal offense that Cleese has committed is that he has criticized Islam. Yeah, in shattered, staggering, dhimmi Britain, that’s equivalent to bombing a bus.
The Free Speech Union reported Thursday that Cleese has been “subjected to a censorious campaign by a group of Muslim activists who go by the name of Deenified.”
These earnest young believers accused Cleese of "spreading dangerous misinformation and creating hostility towards Muslims." They even called the old comedian a "hate preacher," accused him of spreading “hate speech” in the guise of comedy, and demanded (of course) that one of his upcoming shows be cancelled.
Deenified failed to get that particular gig canceled, but another Muslim organization, 5Pillars, “warned that areas with ‘substantial Muslim populations’ could add to demands for his shows in other cities to be cancelled.”
These groups aren’t just trying to stop Cleese from speaking; they’re trying to get him imprisoned. It was 5Pillars that broke the story that Cleese had been reported to Prevent for allegedly "incendiary posts about Muslims and Islam."
It seems that Cleese complained about a culture "whose holy book advocates the killing of all the people they disagree with." He also warned that Britain was "under attack from Muslim belief systems, especially the Koranic..."
If these were false accusations, the people who reported Cleese might have a case, but they are not false. The Qur’an does indeed call upon Muslims to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, 4:91). Who are the people being referred to as “them”? Another Qur’anic passage says “Kill the idolaters wherever you find them” (9:5), and in the Qur’anic scheme, pretty much everyone who is not a Muslim is an idolater.
Cleese also wrote: "I personally prefer a culture that does not approve of FGM, Child Marriage and Killing Infidels," and called Islam "the religion of paedophiles." Here again, is the truth any defense? When two Muslim doctors went on trial a few years ago for performing female genital mutilations in the Detroit area, their defense was that the practice was part of their religion. Child marriage is rampant in some areas of the Islamic world because of the example of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, who consummated his marriage with a nine-year-old girl when he was 54.
The Muslims who reported Cleese appear to be banking on the likelihood that Prevent officials and other British authorities will not be aware that what he said was accurate. With no reference to whether what Cleese said was true or false, “the complainant reportedly described the pattern of social media posts as dehumanising and as collectively attributing violence and criminality to Muslims, and assessed the risk as ‘Moderate to High.’”
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The risk? Do they actually expect the British government, or the British people, to think that Basil Fawlty constitutes some risk to national security? As risible as this is, the British government is actually quite likely to take this complaint seriously, for to do otherwise might risk enraging the nation’s Muslim population, and that is what they want to avoid doing above all.
What, however, did Cleese say that was not true? And that is the problem with all “Islamophobia” initiatives: they make it a crime to tell unwelcome truths. If Britain has any life left in it, any desire to remain a free society, authorities should initiate a national discussion about the truth or falsehood of Cleese’s statements. The British government will never do that in a million years, however, because it knows how such a discussion would turn out: with the exposure of the last few British governments, as well as the present one, as the most massive betrayers of their own people that mankind has ever known.